The banking industry has utilized an ever increasing number of forms which while containing significant amounts of repetitive and common information also require specialized or personalized information to be printed thereon. Besides a need for the ability to print fixed and variable information on documents, it is found to be highly advantageous to print certain informational fields in machine readable form. To this end, special character fonts and recording techniques have been developed which include Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) recording techniques. Although there has been a need to print repetitive variable information in multiple fields on the face of documents, prior art machines have at most exhibited the capability to print one or possibly two fields in selected positions. An example of a machine for printing signatures and/or dates on documents is found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,037,535, entitled High Speed Printing Apparatus and assigned to the common assignee of this invention. While this and similar prior art printers are suitable for their intended applications they are not capable of printing a large number of fields on the documents in a single pass. The necessity for multiple passes, of course, reduces the speed of document processing and requires more operator attention. This has made the assembly and customizing of documents which are used in large quantities an expensive and time consuming undertaking.
Besides the reduced cost effectiveness of many prior art machines these devices have proved to be inflexible with respect to the location of printing. Not only are there constraints upon the size and shape of the documents employed, but adjusting the devices to print at different selected locations on the documents is often time consuming. Also, there are significant areas on the check which cannot be selected for printing.
In addition to the desirability of printing documents at high speeds and with maximum flexibility, the processing needs of banks, for example, often require that multiple types of documents be assembled into one book or lift. As an example, the commonly used checkbook includes not only the drawer's checks but also deposit slips by which the drawer can make deposits. Similarly, an installment loan booklet will include payment coupons and summary statement or advertising documents. It can be seen that it would be highly advantageous to be able to prepare all the documents which are to be assembled into a particular book or lift at the same time. An apparatus most suitable for such an application would have the capability of printing all the different documents within a book or lift in one pass and would also require little operator attention.